How Google’s Search business and humanity’s information is disappearing

Search, Google’s crown jewel, and humanity’s way of finding the world’s information, has big problems. These problems threaten the internet as we know it; if they’re allowed to continue developing, unchecked, the consequences will be far-reaching and severe. Collectively, these threats are called Dark Matter.

What is Dark Matter?

Dark Matter is the information on the internet that search engines cannot see, index or search, and the more Dark Matter there is, the darker Google’s future. It’s the stuff buried within apps, social networks and single-page architectures.

What makes Dark Matter so dangerous and difficult to stop is that the technology responsible for it is has also become essential to modern life. If its growth continues unchecked, Dark Matter could eclipse discoverable information, which would not only destroy Google’s Search, it could take the world’s information and lock it away inside private internet fiefdoms.

Social networks

Social networks have extraordinary reach on the web — 31 percent of humanity has at least one social network account. And the amount of content contributed to the social web is staggering. In 60 seconds, almost 4 million posts are made to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. During that minute, Google processes 3 million searches.

Those social networks are privately controlled. While Facebook is currently searchable, Mark Zuckerberg could decide, at any given moment, to make Facebook and Instagram’s content unavailable to external search engines, instantly transforming an enormous area of the web into Dark Matter. Google could choose to restrict YouTube results to its own engine. Twitter could keep individual tweets from appearing in SERPs. Each of these social platforms has the potential to become its own private internet.

And how does the concept of a private internet play out? We are learning more, in light of the 2016 presidential election, of the existence of filter bubbles, which encourage unprecedented levels of confirmation bias, both in social media and search. That problem will only be exacerbated with the expansion of Dark Matter.

In 60 seconds, almost 4 million posts are made to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Apps have defined the modern, mobile lifestyle. The problem is, they are totally separate from the searchable web as a matter of course. Apps came about in response to technology constraints on the first iPhone. They have developed into the central theme of this technological zeitgeist. Search crawlers have no access to the compiled code of native apps, which lives outside of mobile browsers. The content within apps is unavailable to search engines as a de facto result of their construction.

We’re sticking with policies that took hold in 2007. Since then, mobile browsers and devices have become significantly more powerful, and connection speeds have skyrocketed. So why haven’t we moved beyond the limitations of the native app?

Single-page architectures

The web’s alternatives to native apps do little to solve the problem. The web is replete with single-page sites and web apps. While minimalist single-page executions can be beautiful, and have become wildly popular (despite some reservations in the developmentcommunity) they, like native apps, also exist within their own unsearchable bubbles. That’s because the indexable data within single-page apps do not exist as searchable HTML files, it sits behind executable JavaScript code — and that’s meaningless to a traditional search crawler.

Well, not quite. Google has updated its crawler technology so that it can see the data behind the JavaScript. The problem is, you have to build your site the way Google wants you to. And that’s one bridge too far for many companies. But where does that leave other Search providers, or single-page apps built on other technology? Where does that leave the users who want to use alternative engines, like Bing or DuckDuckGo? There are obvious benefits to single-page designs — like user-friendliness and reduced queries to servers — but are those benefits worth the loss of SEO-ability?

Looking to the future

If you abstract out these issues, you can see where this is going. Search — the core of our internet and the current information paradigm humanity relies on — will collapse under the weight of Dark Matter. As I see it, we have two options:

Google’s Search stays, the world bends to its needs and Dark Matter generators change. Native apps will change to become SEO-able, or move to the web; single-page apps will be built with Search in mind; and social networks will open up to search engines.

Google’s Search dies and something new rises to replace it — something that can search Dark Matter. Imagine Apple builds a search technology to index compiled code. Facebook’s social search rises to become the preferred search for social fiefdoms. The web as we know it today becomes a backwater lounge for internet laggards.

Which scenario is best is a function of who you ask. But when will we know who won?

Despite what popular media might suggest, many paradigm shifts don’t happen in a single, pivotal, “eureka” moment. They are evolutions, not events. They’re at the culmination of many years’ worth of work done by many great minds all contributing to the human effort to eventually solve an enormous problem.

The echelon of innovations that lead to a lasting solution, which Steven Johnson calls the adjacent possible, will be the battlefields that will shed light on who is winning the fight to control the future of information. Over the next decade, it will be a Game of Thrones amongst the Great Houses of Tech:

Google and Facebook will fight to dominate single web pages and web apps with the weapons of Angular and React.

Google will flank Facebook with attempts to control the language of JavaScript itself in the committees of ECMAScript, and Facebook will parry.

On another battlefield, Apple will lock horns with Google over the control and legitimacy of pseudo-indexed native apps through deep linking.

Will we see a return of House Microsoft coming from out of nowhere to reclaim its glory?

Will Google retain the throne? Or will we see the fall of House Google, followed by a crowning of many kings?